Sunday, 22 June 2014

Action from Alresford Town v Winchester City last season. Will either of these clubs' grounds be featured below?

I recently learnt that Hampshire County Council has published aerial photography of the whole county as open data, which means that anybody can do whatever they like with it. Some people will probably find ways of making money from it, others will just enjoy browsing it. Others will create football quizzes from it (that'll be me then).

Whenever I've written about a club from Hampshire, I've always included a National Grid reference in the Details section of my report, which is handy, because commercial aerial photography is usually cut in to 1km tiles based on the National Grid. Thus, I've been able to quickly go back through my reports and gather together National Grid references for every ground at Level 10 or above in Hampshire (currently 41 of them). With this knowledge, I could find the 1km photo tile for each ground, and once I found the stadium, as it's open data, I could snip out the relevant part of the photo, save it to my hard drive and then post a few up here in the form of a quiz!

If you want to find your own club's stadium, firstly find its National Grid reference, then go to this link. From there, click on:

aerial > hampshire > Jpegs > RGB > the relevant .jpeg file

Unfortunately, Hampshire's Big Three, Pompey, Saints and Aldershot Town are all on the edge of 1km tiles and are split over at least two photos (as are one or two lower-ranked clubs). However, most grounds sit wholly within a tile. Here are five of them. But who do these stadia belong to?

A Conference South ground.

The first aerial photo is of one of Hampshire's four Skrill Conference South clubs. Is it: